As you probably already know, iPoker has promised to roll out a 'new' variation of SnG - Twister Poker - today. (They're not new because they're very similar to Expresso SnGs at Winamax that were introduced in August 2013.) They are turbo 3-max winner-takes-all SnGs with a randomised prise pool, available up to the $10 buy-in (why not €10?
).

But surprisingly, they've been rolled out not to all skins. In fact, out of the 4 iPoker clients I have installed, only the Everest one has this tab now (above 'My Poker'), and it's very different from the normal SnG lobby: one has to log in to view it and can't select tables - can only input the desired BI amount and number of tables (up to 6), but can't see opponents' names until the tourney starts. Update: as of Jan 28, a lot of other iPoker rooms have already added it, including Poker770, Betfred, William Hill, Titan, Winner, Paddy Power.

Also, the 3-max WTA format is not new to the network, as there have been Trinity SnGs (with a fixed prize pool, seen in the main SnG lobby from all skins).

As far as BRM, the randomisation of the prize pool doesn't change the strategy: the ideal (by Kelly) number of BI for a given limit is still (ROI+1-ITM) / (ROI*ITM) (with ROI and ITM represented as fractions of 1, i.e. divided by 100%), the nitty variant usually used for the 'learning kurwe' is twice that.

I'll try them out in a while and report. Let's make this thread a place to discuss the strategy of this variation, I guess mainly exploitive lines against the anticipated fish, as Nash push/fold ranges for the WTA prize structure can be developed quite easily.

The formal 'rake' (on which awarded player points are based) is 7% of the total BI, so $0.7 for the top $10 level. (In fact it's a bit over $0.71, as the average prize pool is a bit less than $27.87, but the error of this rounding for cashback purposes is relatively small.)

As said, so far the only one of my iPoker skins that has released them is Everest (update: plus Poker770, Betfred and three non-partner rooms so far)... and it's understandable why. The Twister tables are buggy and way heavier on the CPU for some reason:

I could play up to 12 usual tables even on a 2005 desktop (with 1 GB RAM and 1.7 GHz, I've had to give casino.exe realtime CPU priority, though) with third party software like PT4 in the background, but even as few as 4 Twister tables couldn't run together with PT4, moreover, the entire system froze at times, I couldn't even invoke Task Manager as usual and the only solution was the reset button
So those with old computers, beware.

Also, a black rectangle appeared and closed my hole cards almost every time a new table loaded, and disappeared from that table only when there were 8 seconds to act

Because of the yet limited circle of skins testing them, Twisters are now quite soft, however, the player pool is still big enough even at the $10s to start one every several minutes.

Types of fish vary a lot: some push 25 bb pre with rags, some are passive and limp HU, folding too often to aggression. Proper adjustments can net a ton.

A very common scenario is when opponents clash in a preflop or flop all-in early, so I end up HU as a 1-to-2 underdog in chips. That's where I used to excel and manage to gain a lot of wins in the recreational part of my poker path, so I'm optimistic about my future in Twisters. Any HUSnG reg should be doing fine here too, as adjusting to a fish HU is so vital to the ROI.

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by tonypmm: 21.01.2014 06:15.

100% of the prize pool are always given to the winner, so there are no deviations in the strategy for a reg (the objective is always to win, no matter if the prize is twice the BI or a thousand times the BI), but for a recreational, there's a fun lottery element - the prize for the first place is chosen randomly.

The idea is much like that of a Golden SnG at Stars.

To put it differently, the total buy-in, say, $10, has three components: $6.67 - the one that forms the guaranteed prize pool ($6.67*3=$20.01~2 BI), the rake ($0.70) and the 'jackpot fee' ($2.63) that's redistributed to rare randomly selected tourneys to boost their prize pools.

Some regs may feel underrolled to play them because it's easy to go on a downswing if one hits a streak of tourneys with the prize of merely ~2 BI (instead of the normal 3).

So Twisters are expected to be quite a soft and also fair format. People won't feel hunted and regs won't engage in lobby gaming like in HUSnG: there's no table selection possible here, it's like 3-max Zoom, but with less frequent reseating, allowing to develop brief reads.

But surprisingly, they've been rolled out not to all skins. In fact, out of the 4 iPoker clients I have installed, only the Everest one has this tab now (above 'My Poker'), and it's very different from the normal SnG lobby

This post has been edited 5 time(s), it was last edited by tonypmm: 21.01.2014 13:34.

You'll need 20K games on average, but playing them by no means guarantess that you hit the jackpot over this sample at all; in fact, the probability of not hitting the max prize during the first k*20000 tourneys (where k is far enough from zero) is close to e^{-k}, where e=2.718281828459045... is the base of natural logarithms, e.g. for k=1 (20000 games) it's 1/e~0.368=36.8%. So the first time of hitting it approximately follows an exponential distribution, and the total number of hits by a certain time (as a function of the latter) is well modelled by a Poisson process.

I was going to write some investigation down in connection with the good old Rio and Fort Knox jackpot SnGs, but sleep issues are chasing me, so please have patience.

Specifically in Twisters, the strategy in a single tournament is independent of its prize pool (apart from tilt issues caused by the money pressure) and of other tourneys - it's always winner-takes-all. That's the key difference between them and the 'old' jackpot SnGs, where adjacent games can influence each other dramatically because a series of six wins is much appreciated (is the condition for winning the JP). And I certainly find the 'old' format more interesting - the frequency of hitting the jackpot is predominantly a matter of skill, not only luck like in Twisters.

On the contrary, outcomes of different Twister tourneys are (almost) independent (just can't influence each other, apart from tilt), so it suffices to estimate the EV of a single Twister (the EV of a series of them is just the EV of a single one times the length of the series). The average prize of a $10 Twister is ~$27.87, iPoker rounds 1/3 of it (the amount that an average player wins back) to $9.30 instead of $9.29 but it's not crucial. The gross win of an average player is the total BI minus the announced fee (e.g. $10 - $0.70 = $9.30), so the average net win is minus the fee. To beat the fee, it's necessary to get cashback and exploit fish, as in any other form of poker. So far the fish seems beatable

I'll think about risk management in Twisters and post the outcome; even though I said that the 'Kelly betting' BRM strategy is the same as if they had a fixed prize pool, it implies going down limits when necessary; some people hate moving down but otoh hate having a risk of ruin over, say, 5%, and a method of calculation of the bankroll needed for a smaller risk while playing at the same limit(s) is well-known and described in 'The Mathematics of Poker' by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman. I'm just too sleepy to plug the numbers right now.

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by PriscoInline: 22.01.2014 01:56.

I'm interested to hear discussions about this format. I've won 8 out of 12, including 1 $200 and 1 $40 jackpots.
I haven't seen any decent player in this format yet, only clueless people.
I'm a reg at €10 HU Hypers, so I guess I already have an edge.

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by tonypmm: 22.01.2014 02:21.

Congrats!

Maybe the abundance of clueless people is because skins that have rolled the update out so far (those in whose forums MJPerry has posted and not deleted his 'Twister Poker is here!' threads, i.e. Everest, Poker770, to a lesser extent Betfred) are not very reg-infested. When more regs join and adapt their skill to the format, winrates should go down.

Still, I think it is not very attractive to any HU Sng reg. Afterall, you are probably making more money out of $20 HU Sngs than playing the $10 twister, regardless of the jackpot. Come on, you gotta beat 2 guys to double your buy-in, most of the times, and even when you hit the jackpots, a 3 man hyper turbo has a lot of variance.

So I believe there's always going to be much more fishes than regs on this twister format.
Even after winning this much, I'm skeptical of its profitability, in a way I think my time is better spent playing €10 hu hypers. Maybe it could be more profitable, but then you would need to play so many games it may not be worth it.

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by tonypmm: 22.01.2014 03:08.

HUSnG regs will switch over not only because the format is close to HU, but because there's no table selection available, and thus there's no table blocking. The idea is much akin to HU Zoom in this respect, with an additional benefit of being able to play with the same opponent for more hands in a row to make brief reads.

Plus I'm really afraid that this range of stakes is only a test one, and the offer will then be extended to higher stakes to rival or maybe substitute old-style jackpot SnGs.

I can see the network's point about removing the latter because recs have little chance in those, as they have low 1st place frequencies, which lowers their chance of grabbing a jackpot by many times, and they don't have good cashback so are eaten alive by the 17% rake. Almost all Fort Knoxes already run without recs.

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by PriscoInline: 22.01.2014 23:27.

Still, don't you think 7% rake is kind of a dealbreaker? On HU Sngs it is 4%. So, if we consider the jackpot factor neutral ev, and there are a lot of regs around in twister, wouldn't it be more attractive to stay on the usual HU Sngs, that would have less regs because of twister?

Actually, if you forget about the jackpot, you are playing a $7,37 SNG, and $0,70 is close to 9,5%, 2,4x the rake in a €10 HU Sng

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by tonypmm: 23.01.2014 00:34.

That also depends on your volume - whether you have a real job or grind full time; in the latter case the 7% rake is not a hassle as you'll be able to put in volume huge enough to score well in points races and have 90-100% cashback or (in Rios and Forts) even more (ask NoXz aka Flipp*ndales, the leader of Top100, or Gobias (Ind), or Margar*t1976, the leader of Titan's Grand Battle, who seem to play all of them when they're online), which is harder in HUSnGs.

1. The player has liquid cashback (with essential daily and weekly life expenses deducted) of 45% (e.g. is VIP13 at Betfair or going for it from the very start, so gets instant 50% from point exchange at Betfair with the help of the welcome bonus at first, but has to cash out $250, or 5% of monthly rake, to buy food etc.) and the next bills are due at the beginning of the next month (so he can pay them by race winnings, otherwise should add their value to the said bankroll).

3. The player has quite an accurate assessment of the win % (which is never true, lol). If he's a total beginner, then at least extra $100-200 should be allocated for the 'learning curve' period necessary to build a sample of hundreds of games and get the idea of the win %. After this trial period, he should make a very conservative and pessimistic assessment of the win %, and switch to less swingy games if he turns out underrolled. (Of course it's way easier to use such BRM assessments is one is an established player who has just transitioned from another poker variation where he was winning, then he can predict his win % by his historical position in the food chain.)

4. The player can tolerate a 5% risk of ruin. If he's fine with as much as 10%, he can multiply the above bankroll sizes by 0.8; if he can tolerate only 2% risk, he should multiply them by 1.3; if only 1% - then by 1.5.

To compare, that's what I've got for a grinder of €10 Winner-Takes-All Trinities (if they did run at all) who would be only a VIP12 a Betfair and have 50% cashback after life expenses (which eat more because of lower volume), of which 30% total is liquid. (Rake in Trinities is 9.1%, they're of normal speed and with a fixed prize pool.)

Your post is golden.
I have 39% of first place with a very small sample (couple hundred games),
but I only have 30% rakeback. I don't withdraw tho.
I'm gonna keep on these until my first deposit bonus expires on poker770, but the idea I see is that twisters need a massive volume, probably more than HU or 6 max Hypers.

You didn't count the VIP program (point exchange), gemstones etc. in, did you? As I've seen you grind twisters hard already
, you're not going to have big problems with RB. Select a deal carefully next time and grrrrind it out (a must for any STTs), gl